Sea of Green by Thomas Adcock

Author:Thomas Adcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

I rang up the desk sergeant at Midtown-North and asked him to reserve me a plain car for around seven or so that night.

And then I unhooked the phone and lay flat out on my back on the couch under the window, and I fell asleep in about five seconds flat.

I dreamed I was watching a springer working a shell game down on the street. Bottle caps moving left and right, left and right. The ball under only one of the three caps. And the springer’s thin quick fingers and his quick talk.

See it crawl, like a little red fly on the wall—top-of-the-ball!

And the springer looked just like Samuel Waterman, Jr.—in his lawyer’s three-piece custom-tailored suit and custom English shoes and a shirt with a collar pin and a patterned tie from Hermès.

I was the guy who knew all about the trick shuffles and all about the wall men and the sticks. For all the good it was doing me.

Wasn’t I a stick myself … a shill? A plainclothes SCUM Patrol cop in a greasy coat and a watch cap and a radio in a paper bag most of the time? A strip of Munson’s wallpaper, somebody who was not what he seemed to be?

But no matter all that I knew, I couldn’t pick the right bottle cap.…

There was somebody knocking at my door.

A couple of hours’ sleep dropped out of my life, like threads brushed off a raveled sleeve.

“Hock, you in there?”

It was Mary Rooney’s croaking voice.

More knocking.

“Hock!”

I got up off the couch and started toward the door, and when she heard my step she stopped knocking.

When I opened up the door, there was Mary Rooney in a housedress and a sweater and rollers in her hair. And the

Dominican janitor who lives in the basement was standing next to her out in the corridor, with his chin curled into his chest like he was obliging a hangman and his noose.

“This here’s Ricky,” Mary Rooney said. “I told him he should talk to you since he’s all on about how he done something to the rent collector what was disemboweled up here at your place.”

Ricky looked at me, and beyond me into my apartment, and crossed himself in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.